It's a word that comes up repeatedly in life. How do you balance this with that? Your job with your family? Your education with your social life? Your friends with your boyfriend? How do you properly invest time in multiple things without neglecting any of them? How do you make people in various circles continually feel like they're valued to you, even as other priorities arise?
Honestly, sometimes I think we suck at balance. Especially as females when we enter into dating relationships. Suddenly we disappear from everyone else's life and slip into a place where only our significant other can find us, contact us, communicate with us, hang out with us. No one else matters.
As I've gotten older and remained single while almost all of my friends found the love of their life, I watched as they handled balance. Some did it gracefully, and some just didn't do it at all. I actually grew quite hardened as they began to date people, not because I wasn't excited about them being in relationships, but because I wasn't excited about them being in relationships. Yep, you read that right. Mostly I just got the point where I began to dismiss the friendship because I was used to becoming a low priority on their list. They were too enamored in their newfound love to remember me and care about me and so I inserted distance before they ever could.
It wasn't fair.
Nor was it kind.
It was me making our relationship all about me and what I needed/wanted out of that friendship and when they weren't, for that season, able to give me what they had before... I checked out. It was something I did out of hurt. It was my proactive response to feeling like they were always going to choose their boyfriend/fiance over me. More self-preservation techniques brought to you by yours truly.
I think balance is important though. But, I think beyond that, that we have to be people who choose to love people regardless of the various seasons we go through in life.
As I enter into a new relationship, I want to still be aware of the friends in my life. I want them to feel valued and cared about. I don't want my friendships to be consumed with me talking about my new relationship, either. There has to be a way for me to still be approachable and for others to know that regardless of my relationship status, it doesn't change the fact that I love them. I have to be proactive about making time to hang out, about prioritizing, about letting people outside of my relationship know they still matter.
Because, they do. I need them. I need friends to know how I'm doing and where I'm at and what they can be praying for me about. I need to have perspective outside of a dating relationship so I don't get so sucked in that I lose sight of everything else.
On the flip side, I think friends need to be gracious as couples seek out balance in their relationships. They won't be perfect at it, especially not at first. Instead of being like me, I feel like we need to be better at recognizing that oftentimes, the departure into la-la-land is only temporary. We need to be friends who are willing to remain friends, even when we feel like we're getting the short end of the stick, even when we feel like our friends have abandoned us, even when we feel like we no longer matter. More often than not, we still matter... it just takes some time to figure out how navigate through all of that well, how to have balance as people learn how to invest fully into a relationship and also into their friendships.
So, I guess there's a plea for patience.
Let's be friends who are patient with each other as we figure out how to maintain balance. But let's also be friends who are proactively seeking to find that balance as we find ourselves in new situations, jobs, relationships...that we may live abundantly out of love with all people in our lives.
Let's not disengage, let's not withdrawal....on either end. Let's not take ourselves out of people's lives and let's not be so consumed in only one other person's life that we're missing out on the joy and necessity of relationships with all people.
Let's learn love each other through it all without harboring resentment or animosity toward one another.
Deal?
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